Sunday, January 05, 2014

James Scott's The Kept, a taut revenge tale set in the snowy New York wilderness

The first sentence of Scott’s atmospheric debut, set in frozen upstate New York in 1897, proclaims: “Elspeth Howell was a sinner.” Indeed she is, by anyone’s reckoning, but within this dark, violent landscape, only sinners have a chance.

Already burdened by her transgressions—"anger, covetousness, thievery"—midwife Elspeth arrives at her remote farm after a months-long absence and discovers her family brutally killed—all but 12-year-old Caleb, who shoots her, thinking she is one of the murderers, returned. After Elspeth recovers sufficiently from her wounds, under Caleb’s makeshift care, they set out to bring down the three men responsible.

This taut revenge tale, as gritty as any western, is also an unusual coming-of-age story and a compelling saga of twisted secrets in which the very unmaternal Elspeth and the son she barely knows (and why is that?) slowly form a close bond. Scott writes with sustained intensity and strong descriptive powers, whether evoking the pair’s dangerous trudge through high snowdrifts, the rough lake town where many answers lie, or his characters’ complex lives and motivations.

The Kept is published this Tuesday, January 7th, by Harper ($25.99, hb, 368pp). This review first appeared in Booklist's 11/15/13 issue. Since I'm sitting here in my house on the Midwestern prairie in the middle of Snowpocalypse 2014, awaiting -20 degrees by later tonight, the chilly setting for this historical thriller seemed all too apropos.

7 comments:

Apropos, yes! I do understand. As the temps here in downstate New York plunge I'm reading another appropriate book, though it's not fiction, but an account of the journey John Quincy Adams's wife made across war torn Europe at the end of the Napoleonic era, with a small child, a nursemaid, a man servant and a prisoner of war, from St. Petersburg to Paris, in the dead of winter.

She did it because her husband told her to. He, meanwhile, was warm in Ghent, negotiating the treaty to end the War of 1812 with the Brits.

YOU stay warm and safe -- the ice demons thrown off by the arctic cyclone are no joke.

Why yes, this is Louisa Catherina nee Johnson Adams. She is interesting. But of course she is interesting, having lived with that impossible He, John Quincy Adams, for so long. I first encountered her in The Education of Henry Adams, as HA's grandmother. I would have read Mrs. Adams in Winter when it came out, but that was 2010, and we were on the Eastern Shore with the mandate to do as much research that involved the southern U.S. and history as we could during that appointment. So yankees and northerners were given short or no shrift during that period. And really, her journey had little or nothing to do with the southern U.S. domestic slave trade or their slave-breeding industry, so, no. But my partner-in-crime gave it to me as a Christmas prezzie -- we've become Adams Family boosters, since that 2010-2011 era.

I'm reading this book but I still haven't gotten the Kobo he also gave me hooked up! MUST DO THAT! :)